SHOWING SIGNS OF WEAR

SHOWING SIGNS OF WEAR
Solo Show by Eliaichi Kimaro [ On display at The Cloud Room March 12-April 6 ]
Artist Statement

As a self-taught artist and creative storyteller, I am constantly reinventing myself, experimenting with new materials and techniques, and learning whatever medium it takes to tell the story that is emerging.

Over the past 40 years, I have used writing, music, photography, film, and now mixed media art to explore my personal/family narrative.  Across every medium, I find beauty in the rusty, weathered and worn. I love the stories that scars hold ~ and feel compelled to take those stories of survival and turn them into something beautiful to behold.

This body of work hangs together loosely.  To me, they are more about the process, the journey of becoming.  They evoke the layered narratives that we all carry—as individuals in this present moment, and as the embodiment of our ancestors’ stories spanning generations and continents.   They represent new directions I am taking as an artist -- using mark-making, texture, cold wax medium and organic materials to tell a story.  Some of these pieces came into being fully-formed.  Some were labors of love, with 2 or 3 completely different paintings existing beneath the surface.

While I am excited to share these paintings in their current incarnations, some of them will be radically transformed – scraped down, carved into, painted over—when they return to my studio.  But as a lover of process, I believe that even our work-in-progress selves deserve an occasional spotlight…to be seen, witnessed and considered in our current state of being…and becoming.